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NUSVM.bitnet>Following is a second summary of responses to my query on adjectives. The first part consists of 9 slightly-edited responses to my query and/or the first summary, arranged according to language; the second part contains some general comments of my own, and a new query. ------------------------------------------------------- ENGLISH (Larry Gorbet) Just read your summary of responses to your query about adjectives in NP positions. Some of the English data is questionable in relevance, I think. In particular, many (classes of) "adjectives" that occupy N or NP position act very much like lexical nouns, not adjectives. In particular, signs of this lexicalization include 1. idiosyncratic number 2. idiosyncratic nominal content (i.e. the "adjective" is interpreted only as a noun of a particular class modified by the adjective) 3. idiosyncratic senses (i.e. the "adjective" is only interpreted with a proper subset of its possible senses) 1. IDIOSYNCRATIC NUMBER Note that while (a) is OK, (b) is not: (a) The carnivorous are ferocious (b) *The carnivorous is ferocious. Or (c) Lonely are the brave. (d) *Lonely is the brave. (e) *The obvious are not always correct. (f) The obvious is not always correct. 2. IDIOSYNCRATIC NOMINAL CONTENT Lots of "adjectives" only refer to humans despite in principle being applicable to other classes of nominals (g) Only the tall will make the team. [humans] (h) ?*Only the tall will be preserved. [trees] (i) *Only the tall are unstable. [buildings] Others, like (f) above, only apply to abstract propositions 3. IDIOSYNCRATIC SENSES (a) I'll take the large. [nominal clothing size] (b) *I'll take the large. [actual size of "unsized" shawl] The distribution of these supports the fact that they are lexicalized nouns. That is, the distribution of particular "adjectives" and of certain semantic (etc.?) classes of "adjectives" fits the nominals (and senses) with which one would expect them to be used most often. ------------------------------------------------------- DUTCH (Jan Rijkhoff) In response to your query some time ago on the use of dummies in terms "headed" by adjectives: I believe that might be a correlation with (grammatical/noun inherent) gender. For instance, Dutch (gender): de rode (the red one), de grote (the big one), de lelijke (the ugly one); notice that English (no gender) has the dummy. A short time after I thought of this possible correlation (several years ago), I read an article by Pieter Muysken and Frans Hinskens, who seemed to have had the same idea (more or less), so I let it rest. If you are interested I can send you a (non-final) copy of their article (in Dutch I'm afraid), which I must have somewhere in my "archives". ------------------------------------------------------- GREEK (Stavros Macrakis) There appear to be three issues here, and it's not clear which one you're interested in: 1) Can you use an adjective without a noun to form an NP? 2) In this case, do you need to mark the adjective in some special way, different from a noun? 3) Is there some sort of "pronoun" like "one" which takes the place of the noun. In Modern Greek, you have (1) but not (2) or (3): Pjo fustani protimas? Which(n) skirt(n) prefer(2s pres. ind.)? Which skirt do you prefer? To kokino. The(n) red(n). The red one. To kitrino ine fthinotero. The(n) yellow(n) is cheaper(n). The yellow one is cheaper. ------------------------------------------------------- HINDI (Bhuvaneswari Narasi) I just saw the responses to your request for examples of adjectives that occur as complete NPs'. Here's an example from Hindi: "Lal gadi" = red car "Lal vala" = the red one "Vala" (or "wallah" as the British spell it), also attaches to various nouns as an agentive suffix - e.g. "dhobi-vala" (washerman). With adjectives however, it has the meaning "one"..... ------------------------------------------------------- ARABIC (Maher Awad) [...] regarding your questions of adjectives occupying NP slots by themselves, Arabic has constructions equivalent to: I want the red. (meaning I want the red one) I want a red one. same meaning. But you cannot have: I want the red one. In short, you cannot have 'one' with an indefinite article (zero in Arabic). ------------------------------------------------------- TURKIC (Vern M. Lindblad) The common wisdom about Turkic langs. is that there are two sets of stems, nominals and verbals (leading to the Turkological convention of using + to mark nominal morpheme boundaries and - to mark verbal morpheme boundaries). There are very few stems that can take both sets of suffixes (though there are various suffixes that change nominals into verbals and vice versa). However, many 'nominal' stems quite freely take both nominal and adjectival suffixes, so that there is only minimal differentiation between nouns and adjectives. Thus, it probably easier for an adj. in a Turkic lang. to stand alone as an NP than in most other langs. However, this is not something that I've looked into seriously, so my comments should be taken as suggesting a possible line of inquiry, rather than as authoritative. ------------------------------------------------------- JAPANESE (Bart Mathias) As a specialist in Japanese, I refrained from responding to your question about "red one" type languages because, as you surmise on the basis of the notes you got on Japanese, the "no" in question is a nominalizer, but not a noun (or even a word, though I know of one problem that gets in the way of calling it a suffix) apparently of the type you mention in your original query. I'm just writing this to confirm that surmisal, because your correspondents did not make it quite clear. "No," unlike "one," is not an independent word; it must follow--attach to--a tensed form or a noun(! the situation transformationalist types like to consider a reduction of "no no," where the former "no" is a genitive, but that doesn't help much). When it follows a tensed form it can be thought of as the head of a relative clause (thus closer to "one that is red" than to "red one"), but in fact it also ends "headless relatives," and should be considered as giving a syntactic role to the word it ends rather than playing its own syntactic role. ------------------------------------------------------- ASL (Therese Shellabarger) I am a second language user of ASL, so don't have to take my word for this exactly, but in ASL one can sign using what English uses as adjectives for nouns, and specifying quantifiers so that you could sign an equivalent of "I want the Red one" with "red" being the noun and "one" being how many, only if there were more than one "Red" objects of the same kind to pick from. Red would be used as a distinguishing feature of the object in question. If you used "one" simply to match the equivalent English sentence, then you would be using signed English, which gets into a totally other ballgame. As an example of the above, a deaf woman I used to live with pointed out to me the good ASL of her children one time to me when they were cold and wanted the "orange hot"--meaning, the heater which when hot the elements glowed orange. My gloss of their signs is not meant to be taken as an English translation, but rather to clarify what they signed for readers who know ASL... ------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL (Kate Kearns) I just read your summary of responses to your query. I felt people were responding with two different types of phenomena because there were two types in your query: NPs with dummy heads, as in your example "I want the red one", where the dummy is anaphoric or otherwise contextually identified, and "adjectives standing by themselves as NPs", maybe with some morphology, but presumably distinguished from the other construction by the absence of a separate nominal element as head of NP. A candidate for the second type in English would be 'The good, the bad and the ugly', 'Eat the rich', (movies) or 'the poor are always with us'; these don't have any context-dependence. Maybe there is an empty category bound by 'the', but it's not clear how it is governed if the whole NP is in subject position. Also 'The secret of life is taking the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad' - here I think 'good' and 'bad', presumably also 'rough' and 'smooth', strike me as zero conversions to nouns. ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- SOME GENERAL COMMENTS (David Gil) My original impetus in posing the query was to check out a hypothesis that was suggested to me by Martin Haspelmath, and is similar to that proposed by Jan Rijkhoff above, namely that the ability of an adjective to stand alone as head is correlated with the richness of adjectival morphology in the language in question. That is to say, if an adjective bears lots of nominal- like inflections, it will be able to head an NP, whereas if it is morphologically bare, it will need some kind of dummy "one", nominalizer, or other such prop. The results of the query, and my own work, cast some doubt on this hypothesis, while perhaps supporting a modified version of it, involving a uni-directional implicational universal. The following table provides a very rough classification of languages in accordance with the richness of their adjectival morphology [columns] and their strategies for letting an adjective constitute the main semantic element of an NP, ie. for saying "(I want the) red one" [rows]. little or no A rich A morphology morphology bare A Hungarian, Estonian Dutch, Hebrew Malay (Peranakan) <Punjabi> Tagalog, <Punjabi> A plus English, Sinhalese dummy "one" A plus Mandarin, Japanese <Punjabi> nominalizing Malay (Standard) (particle) particle or <Punjabi> (particle) affix Lezgian, Malayalam (affix) Note that the top left corner cell, containing languages with little or no adjectival morphology but nevertheless allowing adjectives to head NPs, is well-documented: these languages thus violate the proposed universal. However, the middle and bottom right cells are still rather weakly attested; so there may perhaps be some basis for a uni-directional implicational universal, to the effect that if a language has rich adjectival morphology, then it will permit its adjectives to head NPs (but not vice versa). (The only counterexample that I am familiar with to the latter, weaker claim, is Punjabi, which, as suggested by the angular brackets, simultaneously fills four out of the six cells. What this means is as follows: in Punjabi there are two classes of adjectives, one with gender marking, the other without; and *both* classes can either occur as bare heads of an NP or in construction with a nominalizing particle "vaala", similar to Japanese "no", Mandarin "de", Malay "yang", etc. Thus, Punjabi singlehandedly refutes any correlation between morphological richness and the ability of an adjective to stand alone as NP head.) So here's a more specific query: can anybody provide better examples of languages to fill the middle and bottom right cells? That is to say, is anybody familiar with a language that has rich adjectival morphology, but in which adjectives cannot stand by themselves as heads, but need a dummy "one", or nominalizing particle or suffix? Finally, a methodological/philosophical observation. At the same time that I posed the original query on adjectives, a rather heated discussion of pro-drop was taking place over the list. Although there are some interesting parallels between the two issues (they both concern the licensing of "empty" positions; in both cases correlations with morphological richness have been proposed), the adjective query didn't generate anywhere near as much interest as the pro-drop issue. These days, it would seem, verbs are just plain sexier than adjectives. Any ideas why? (And is this a fact about verbs and adjectives, or a fact about us linguists?)Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue